The Mixtec

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In the colonial dictionaries compiled by Dominican friars in the sixteenth century, the people of the Oaxacan mountains gave their own name for themselves: Ñuu Dzaui, the People of the Rain — ñuu a word that folds place and people into one, the settlement and those who belong to it spoken together; dzaui, the rain. They were the nation of the rain, and their tongue, Dzaha Dzaui, the Language of the Rain, an Oto-Manguean language still spoken today by hundreds of thousands across the highlands and in the migrant communities the Ñuu Savi have carried as far as the agricultural valleys of California. The name by which the wider world knows them is not theirs but their neighbors’. The Mexica of the central plateau called them Mixtecah in Nahuatl — people of the land of the clouds — and that exonym, fixed by conquest and then by ethnography, became Mixtec. The cloud and the rain name the same country from two directions.

The land of the rain is not one country but three. The Mixteca Alta, the high country, is a fractured terrain of valleys above two thousand meters, cold and thin-aired, where the dynastic kingdoms clustered. The Mixteca Baja drops lower and runs hotter and drier, its slopes among the most eroded landscapes in Mexico, scarred by centuries of farming the steep ground. And the Mixteca de la Costa falls away west and south into humid tropical lowland along the Pacific. Across these three zones, after the great Classic centers of the region declined around the ninth century, a distinct civilization consolidated: not an empire under a single crown but a dense lattice of small kingdoms, each ruled by its own dynasty, bound and rebound to one another by marriage, alliance, feud, and war. This was the Postclassic world of the Ñuu Dzaui, and it is among the very few civilizations of the ancient Americas whose own internal history — its kings and queens, named and dated, generation upon generation — can still be read in books the civilization itself made.

The painted books

The signature of Mixtec civilization is the codex. A handful of these pre-conquest manuscripts survive the burnings of the sixteenth century, and they are objects of extraordinary craft. A scribe took strips of deerskin — the Codex Vienna was assembled from fifteen such strips glued end to end into a band over eleven meters long — and folded the leather accordion-fashion into a screenfold that opens like a wall of pages. Over the hide went a ground of fine white lime gesso, polished smooth; on that surface the painter drew with a precise carbon-black or red line and filled the figures with flat mineral color, blues and yellows and the deep reds of iron oxide and cochineal. The result reads less like writing in the alphabetic sense than like a visual language of its own — a semasiographic system in which standardized signs for persons, places, dates, and actions are deployed according to firm conventions rather than spelled out in words.

The reader does not move left to right across a line. Thin red guide-lines partition each page into registers, and the eye follows them in a boustrophedon, an up-and-down zigzag like the turning of a plow at the end of each furrow, so that the narrative snakes through the columns of a page and then carries on across the fold to the next. Persons are named for the day of their birth in the 260-day sacred count — Eight Deer, Six Monkey, Nine Wind — each name a number-and-sign compound, often joined to a second, descriptive byname rendered as an attribute the figure wears or holds: Jaguar Claw, War Quechquemitl, Flint Knife. Places appear as place-signs, hill or plain or river glyphs marked with the specific qualifier that fixes a town, a system whose grammar the scholar Mary Elizabeth Smith reconstructed in her 1973 study of Mixtec place signs and maps, making it possible to anchor the painted histories to real geography on the ground.

The surviving pre-Hispanic books — known collectively as the Mixtec Group — divide by what they tell. The Codex Vienna (the Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus I, called Yuta Tnoho for the place at its heart) carries on its obverse the sacred and cosmological matter: the origin of the world and the gods and the founding lineages. The Codex Zouche-Nuttall (the Tonindeye), now in the British Museum and first published by Zelia Nuttall in 1902, and the Codex Bodley in Oxford together carry the great dynastic chronicle — the genealogies, marriages, alliances, and conquests of the eleventh- and twelfth-century rulers of the highland kingdoms. The Codex Colombino-Becker (the Iya Nacuaa) narrates the deeds of a single hero-king. And the Codex Selden (the Añute), painted into the early colonial period around 1556, was found in 2016 to be a palimpsest: under its surface, hidden by the gesso of reuse, an earlier painted history survives, recovered by hyperspectral imaging. The purpose of all of them was, at root, the same — to legitimate a ruling line, to fix its descent from the founders and its claim on the land. They are at once sacred history, charter, and law.

The world raised at Apoala

The cosmological pages of the Vienna codex open before human history begins. In the Ñuu Dzaui account of origins, the first generative powers are paired — a Lord and a Lady whose calendrical names mark them as the source — and from them the work of ordering the still-unfinished world proceeds. The central actor is Lord Nine Wind, named for the day and identified with the wind-and-breath principle that runs through Mesoamerican thought as the feathered-serpent civilizer. Nine Wind descends from the sky, receives his insignia from the elder gods, and lifts the bands of sky and water apart to disclose the earth between them; he carries the implements of culture down to the new land, and presides over the first dawn, the first rising of the sun over a world that until then had known only darkness.

The lineages themselves are born from the land. At Apoala — Yuta Tnoho, the river from which the lineages are drawn out, a real place of springs and a canyon in the northern Alta — a great tree stands, and from its split trunk emerge the first ancestors, the men and women from whom the ruling houses descend. To be born of the tree at Apoala is to hold a title to rule that no later conquest can erase; the founding scene is the deepest root of dynastic legitimacy, and the codices return to it. Around the founders move the ñuhu — sacred, earth-bound presences that inhabit mountains, caves, springs, and stones, and to whom the land itself belongs in a way that mere human tenancy does not. Over the whole stands Dzahui, the rain, the patron power of the nation, lord of the storm and of the fertility that the storm brings to a country where rain is the difference between harvest and famine. The Mixtec sky was watched as closely as any in the ancient Americas: the great planet that the central-Mexican peoples knew as the morning and evening star — the body that astronomy now calls Venus — moved through a cult of the heavens shared across Mesoamerica, and the astrology of the 260-day count, read by priests through the apparatus of Mesoamerican divination, governed when a child should be named, when a marriage should be made, when a war should be opened. The mythology of Apoala and the genealogy of the kings were not two things but one continuous account, the sacred and the political painted on the same skin.

The saga of Lord Eight Deer

The longest sustained narrative the codices preserve — and the most fully reconstructed life of any individual in the pre-conquest Americas — is the saga of a ruler born in the highland town of Tilantongo (Ñuu Tnoo, the Black Town) on a day in the year recorded as 1063. His calendar name was Eight Deer; his nickname, painted as the claw he wears, was Jaguar Claw. He was not born to the principal throne. The codices follow him across a lifetime of maneuver, war, alliance, and ritual office as he climbs from a junior position to a power no Mixtec lord held before or after: the union of the highland and lowland realms under a single hand.

Two episodes fix the shape of the life. The first is his journey to the coast and the founding of his rule at Tututepec, the great Mixtec kingdom of the Pacific lowlands, a seat that gave him the wealth and reach the landlocked highland towns lacked. The second is the ceremony that made him a tecuhtli, a great lord in the central-Mexican mold. In a rite the codices depict with care, a priest pierced his nasal septum and set into it a turquoise nose-ornament — the insignia of a rank conferred not at home but by Lord Four Jaguar, a Toltec-style overlord associated in the manuscripts with the power of the wider plateau. The episode binds the Tilantongo dynasty to the prestige of the Tula-centered world, the toltecayotl that the Toltec name carried as a byword for legitimate kingship and high civilization across Postclassic Mesoamerica; through it, a highland Mixtec warlord clothed his rule in the authority of the recognized imperial tradition. Eight Deer’s reign over Tilantongo, dated in the codices to the years 1097 through 1115, is counted there in conquests — the Zouche-Nuttall tallies dozens upon dozens of towns brought under his arm, a campaign of unification without precedent among the Ñuu Dzaui kingdoms.

The saga is not a triumph without cost, and the codices do not paint it as one. Eight Deer’s rise runs through a long and bitter contest with the lords of rival houses, among them the formidable queen Six Monkey of Jaltepec, a war-leader and ruler in her own right whose own deeds fill pages of the chronicle. His consolidation of power involved the killing of rival kin, and the books keep the account. In the year 1115 the reckoning came: a surviving heir of a house he had destroyed, Lord Four Wind, raised an army, defeated Eight Deer, and had the great warlord taken and sacrificed. He had reigned eighteen years over the united realm and was, the codices reckon, fifty-two years old — one full cycle of the calendar, the bundling of the years, the age at which the count returns to its beginning. That a Mixtec painter, generations later, could record an enemy’s victory and a hero’s death in the same sober register in which he recorded the conquests is itself a measure of what these books were: not propaganda for the living alone, but the kept memory of the line, owed accuracy because the dead were owed it.

Gold, turquoise, and the work of the hands

The Ñuu Dzaui were, by the testimony of friend and enemy alike, the supreme metalsmiths of Mesoamerica. The overwhelming majority of surviving pre-Hispanic Mexican goldwork is Mixtec, and the Mexica themselves prized Mixtec craftsmen and demanded their work in tribute. The signature technique was lost-wax casting: the smith modeled the object in wax over a clay core, encased it, melted out the wax, and poured molten gold into the void it left — a method that allowed the casting of forms of astonishing delicacy, including a false filigree in which a lacework that looks woven from wire is in fact cast in a single pour. To this they joined hammering, annealing, and the gilding of copper-gold alloys, and a lapidary art of equal refinement: mosaics of turquoise and shell laid over wood or bone or skull, inlays of jade and rock crystal, the patient fitting of small stones into images.

The fullest revelation of this art came on an early morning in January 1932, when the archaeologist Alfonso Caso, excavating at the old Zapotec hilltop city of Monte Albán above the Oaxaca valley, opened a tomb that had been cut and used in the Classic period and then, centuries later, reopened and filled by Mixtec lords for a burial of their own. Tomb 7 held one of the richest funerary deposits ever found in the Americas: on the order of five hundred objects, among them more than a hundred of gold — pectorals, a famous breast-ornament, rings, bells, beads, ear-spools — together with silver, jade, turquoise mosaic, amber, rock crystal worked to translucency, pearls, and a set of carved bones, some three dozen of them, jaguar and eagle bone incised with miniature scenes in the very iconography of the codices. The find reset the chronology of the region, demonstrating a Mixtec presence at Monte Albán long after the Zapotec city’s Classic heyday, and it reset Mexican archaeology itself: the discovery led within two years to the country’s 1934 law for the protection of monuments and, by 1939, to the founding of the National Institute of Anthropology and History. The treasure of Tomb 7 sits today in the museum housed in the former Dominican convent of Santo Domingo in the city of Oaxaca, a few kilometers below the tomb that held it.

Kingdoms, conquest, and the colonial turn

The Mixtec political world was never unified after Eight Deer; the norm was the yuhuitayu, the joint kingdom created when a lord and a lady of two ruling houses married and seated their lines together, the realm carried as much through queens as through kings. This dense field of small dynastic states proved remarkably durable. When the Mexica empire pressed south in the fifteenth century, it broke and absorbed major Mixtec and mixed centers — Coixtlahuaca fell and was made a tributary province, garrisoned, taxed in cloth, cochineal, greenstone, quetzal feathers, and gold dust — yet many Mixtec polities held their independence to the end, never folded into Tenochtitlan’s grasp. When the Mexica capital fell to the Spanish and their allies in 1521, the conquest reached Oaxaca within months under Francisco de Orozco, and the Mixtec lords largely submitted without the long war the central valley had seen.

Submission was not erasure. The Ñuu Dzaui dynasties survived the conquest as a colonial nobility, the caciques who held their towns under Spanish law, and the painted tradition did not stop: codices like the Selden were still being made in the mid-sixteenth century, and a new colonial genre of pictorial-alphabetic documents — land titles, lawsuits, lordly genealogies argued before Spanish courts — carried the old visual language forward in defense of the old claims. The historian Kevin Terraciano, working from the vast archive of documents written in the Mixtec language itself across the colonial centuries, has shown how thoroughly the structures of the ñuu and the yuhuitayu persisted under the new order, recast in notarial Spanish but recognizably continuous with the world the codices describe.

Reading the books

The decipherment of the Mixtec codices is one of the genuine recoveries of twentieth-century scholarship. The decisive move came from Alfonso Caso, the same archaeologist who opened Tomb 7: in a series of studies culminating in Reyes y reinos de la Mixteca (Kings and Kingdoms of the Mixteca, 1977–1979), he established that the painted books were not undatable myth but historical chronicle, identified the calendar-name personages across manuscripts, and matched the place-signs of the codices to towns on the colonial map — the breakthrough being his reading of the Map of Teozacualco, which let a painted genealogy be pinned to a real Mixtec kingdom. Mary Elizabeth Smith then systematized the place-sign grammar in Picture Writing from Ancient Southern Mexico: Mixtec Place Signs and Maps (1973). The historical reading was deepened by Maarten Jansen, whose analysis of the codices as history rather than ritual cycle — the Zouche-Nuttall whose folios are now studied page by page — and whose long collaboration with the Mixtec scholar Gabina Aurora Pérez Jiménez restored the indigenous-language names to the manuscripts and to the figures painted in them. Smarthistory’s account of the Codex Zouche-Nuttall traces how the screenfold is read across its registers, and the relation of the rain-cult that the codices encode to the sacred geography of the highlands has been mapped archaeologically in studies of the surviving sanctuaries of the Rain God in the Mixteca, where Dzahui was venerated at the springs and caves the codices name. The work continues among historians of the colonial Mixtec archive and among Ñuu Savi scholars recovering their own past.

The painted books are not relics of a finished people. The work of reading them has restored to the Ñuu Dzaui a written history reaching back a thousand years, kept in their own signs. In the canyon at Apoala the springs still rise where the tree of origins stood, and the descendants of the People of the Rain still speak the Language of the Rain in the high valleys and far beyond them; the names painted on the deerskin — Eight Deer, Six Monkey, Nine Wind — are read again by those who can trace the line that the codices were made to keep.

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